As the social and professional networks of people becomes connected, and connectivity becomes increasingly widespread, a person's ability to manage and optimize how time is allocated to important information and people is vital to personal productivity. Tools, systems, and practices are required to help people cope with what is otherwise known as “Conversation Overload”. Fortunately, advances in this area are coming from several directions, ranging from communications systems to search-based technologies for managing and organizing information.
Today, users have found ways to manage information overload. Users have come to realize that they can/will not be able to read/know all the things they think they should read/know. But, conversation overload is different, because users want to have all these conversations. They are important to users and are self activated expressions of their intent.
There are several conventional systems attempting to manage communications overload or conversation overload. These include Attensa which uses Real Simple Syndication (RSS) technology to track user subscriptions to help users track where they spend their time and attention. Another system is AttentionTrust, a Firefox plug-in that allows users to track their web “click-streams” and manage how their time spent on web pages is used to convey their attention. Touchstone has created an Attention Engine that collects where users spend their attention and allows them to share that information broadly or selectively. Google uses key word mapping of user emails to trigger advertisement placements that are relevant to users email communication conversations.